Here are some simple facts, for instance:

On a Saturday at 11 p.m., it’s easier to hail a cab on the nightclub-and-bar-filled Lower East Side than at Grand Central Terminal. Columbus Circle gets more passenger pickups than the Port Authority bus station. And make sure you are in the right neighborhood: taxi rides are 25 times as likely to start in the West Village as in Washington Heights.

I am wondering whether these patterns are optimal in the economic sense.

One non-optimality is that too many cabs cruise (and deliver passengers) in the crowded part of the city, not taking congestion costs into account.  But that we already knew.  Congestion aside, is there another suboptimal clustering effect?

If I go hear Joe Lovano at the Village Vanguard (West Village, heavily cabbed), 11 p.m. show, I know I don't have to walk back to my uptown hotel or take the subway.  So I make cab-dependent plans and I go to the late show rather than the early show.  Some particular cabbie benefits from the fact that other cabbies have cultivated a pool of ready customers in the area.  It's like a well-functioning singles bar with lots of matches.

If one extra cab were allocated away from the West Village and to Washington Heights, would that create on net more valuable cab-consistent plans?  That's an empirical question, but the basic issue is whether marginal spillover externalities are more potent in very dense or very sparse clusters.  

You'll note that, by law, cabs are supposed to charge a single rate for all rides.  That leads to a shortage of trips in dangerous areas, but it doesn't answer the question about where the marginal externality is greater.  It could be that the sparse cluster cannot achieve critical mass and thus investing there is largely a waste.

A second question is whether the marginal external benefit is greater for the cabbie or the rider.  As Coase's logic indicates, riders can be misallocated just as cabs can be.  Maybe I'm going to the wrong night club.

Addendum: I liked this bit:

At 3 a.m. on a Sunday, passengers stumble into more cabs at 10th Avenue and 27th Street in Chelsea than anywhere else in the city. About as many taxi trips begin there at that hour on average as at 9 a.m. on a weekday at the Seventh Avenue entrance to Penn Station.

Taxi trips may also offer a more objective guide to night-life trends than Zagat: late-night pickups in the meatpacking district dominate other popular areas like Sheridan Square and St. Marks Place. The East Village barely cracks the top 10 on early Sunday mornings, but if you need a cab, try Third Avenue and 11th Street.

There's also a new iPhone application that tells you where to stand to maximize your chances of getting a cab; I wonder if this will turn out like portfolio insurance in 1987!?

Here is the abstract of a very sophisticated and detailed study:

This paper uses a multicountry macroeconometric model to estimate the macroeconomic effects of a Chinese yuan appreciation. The estimated effects on U.S. output and employment are modest. Positive effects on U.S. output from a decrease in imports from China are offset by negative effects on U.S. output from increased inflation and from a decrease in U.S. exports to China because of a Chinese contraction.

Here is the paper and thanks to E. Barandiaran for the pointer.

Is this real?

OK.  Let's put it right out there.  Buy a Job Reference  allows you to make up any fake job reference, job title, salary, any dates of employment and any other information you would like to place on your resume or next job application and WE WILL HAVE YOUR BACK..  The human resource department of one of our established companies will provide the details of your choice to anyone who calls.

I thank Jim Crozier for the pointer.

A friend recently had a child.  Question: Is this better modeled as an increase in aggregate demand or a reduction in aggregate supply?

Hat tip: Scott Guile.

Monday night I gave a talk at George Mason University on the jobless recovery; in the comments Pete Boettke summarizes some parts of the talk.  One point I made is that the slow aspects of the recovery do not, contrary to some accounts, seem to stem from uncertainty about the plans of the Obama administration.  I see at least two reasons for this doubting this account:

1. Output has recovered much more rapidly than the labor market; last quarter gdp growth exceeded five percent yet employment is essentially flat.  The labor market is one of the least regulated sectors of the American economy, so it would be odd if regulation were causing the slow aspects of the bounceback.  Many of the extant government-blaming hypotheses predict slow output growth, not rapid output growth and slow labor market participation.

2. Arguably health care and finance have been subject to the most regulatory uncertainty.  Yet the health care sector has held up OK and banks have made a very strong comeback in terms of profits.

I believe the causes of the jobless nature of the recovery are unique to the labor market.  I hope to blog more about these reasons and to communicate further points from my talk.